Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, guys, introducing David Swanson.
He really is one of the most accomplished and most important anti-war activists that we have in America today.
It started with AfterDowningStreet.org, or I don't know what he was doing for that, but it came to our attention in 2003 or 2004 with AfterDowningStreet and WarIsACrime.org and just tons of great journalism and speeches and activism of all kinds going on, you know, the whole terror war long here.
And in his book, War is a Lie, he debunks the cossus belly excuses for every American war.
And yes, including World War Two.
And you get a great taste of that in this article.
I love this.
The Ancient Mythical Rites of Pearl Harbor Day.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Great to be here.
Listen, very happy to have you here.
And so, well, first of all, there's the whole what really happened at Pearl Harbor and why and all of that.
And boy, do you knock that one out of the park.
But what do you mean by the Ancient Mythical Rites of Pearl Harbor here?
Well, it's become an element of a state religion in the United States.
It's a holiday that's used to sanctify war through myths of innocence and victimhood.
It's a stopover that presidents like Trump and everyone before him for the past more than half a century have made on their travels to make that point.
You know, Trump goes to to Pearl Harbor on his way to Asia to to say to the U.S. public, this is this is why we have wars.
Because we are the victims of a surprise attack that were innocent and law abiding and peaceful.
And we were compelled to fight back for the good of humanity.
And we just haven't quite finished yet.
Yeah, it really is like the Luke Skywalker story, right?
Oh, man, I can't come with you, Obi-Wan.
I have to go home and be a good nephew to my uncle, the farmer.
And then, oh, geez, the stormtroopers killed my uncle.
And now there's nothing for me here but to join up with you.
It's the American myth all the time.
In fact, I just read a great little essay by a little introductory essay by Tom Englehart, where he talked about all the Westerns that he watched when he was a boy.
And how in every Western, it's always an ambush by the Indians.
So they're always the aggressors, even though the story is a wagon train moving west and occupying their land and doing all these things.
But it always starts with an ambush.
And so the Anglos are always the defenders, no matter what.
I think that's absolutely right.
And not just defending themselves as they move into territory that's a free-for-all, but benefiting the world philanthropically through their wars.
So really, when I ask, as I said in this article, when I ask any ordinary group of U.S. citizens, U.S. residents, name a war that's justified, they never, ever name a war in the past 75 years.
They almost always name World War II.
You can bet on it.
And when you say why, they almost never say anything about Pearl Harbor.
But if you address what they say first, Pearl Harbor almost always comes up second.
And what they say first is the Holocaust.
And the Holocaust lies are quite different from the Pearl Harbor lies.
And I don't mean the fascist lies that there was no Holocaust.
I mean the lie that the U.S. military and the U.S. government tried to prevent the Holocaust.
And it's different because this was public knowledge through the 30s, 40s, 50s.
It was never a secret that had to be exposed.
The public opinion and public policy and widely reported understanding was that the U.S. and other countries as well would refuse to accept any Jews because they were Jews, didn't want them, condemned them to their fate, refused to help them in any way, couldn't be bothered to bring them out of Germany.
And so that whole history has had to be erased.
When you get to the Pearl Harbor then, there's also similarly the whole context of decades of buildup of hostility with Japan and the decades before that of mentoring Japan in imperialism and so forth.
But there's also evidence that had to come out after the fact, meetings that were in fact secret.
There was in fact some effort made to depict a concerted effort to get Japan to attack as an innocent victimhood of surprise aggression.
But the basic facts have now been known for a long, long time and are still avoided.
All right, and so the question comes down to – because I don't think anybody says that the zeros were holograms or that it was white boys flying them and that the whole thing was a hoax.
Japan attacked that day.
That much is agreed upon.
So what's the point of confusion here?
Well, I'm sure somebody does say that.
Somebody will say anything.
But the point is, again, the context that was never any secret, that before Pearl Harbor you had George Marshall telling the press the U.S. was going to fight an aggressive war against Japan.
You had the draft instituted.
You had the National Guard activated.
You had the big navy built up in two oceans.
You had bases acquired from the British.
You had concerted effort by Roosevelt to get into the war.
Specifically the war in Europe lies about a couple of ships, the Greer and the Kearney, lies about having a Nazi map of a takeover.
Wait.
Slow down a little bit, man.
Teach us some stuff.
We've got a minute.
Well, just like Woodrow Wilson with the Lusitania and other ships, there was this routine pretense that ships that were in fact helping British aircraft target German subs were just innocent civilian ships.
And Roosevelt tried that a number of times without really bringing the U.S. public around.
He also tried claiming he had obtained a secret Nazi map of how they were going to divide up the Western Hemisphere when they proclaimed Nazi dominion over the earth and eliminated all religions other than Nazism and so forth.
And this was a fabrication of Karl Rovian quality, actually fabricated by British spies working in the U.S. and Canada.
Anyway, none of that worked until Pearl Harbor.
But you now have, as with Iraq, a Downing Street memo.
You have the minutes of a meeting at Downing Street, this one from August 18th, 1941 rather than 2002.
So just after Roosevelt snuck off to meet with Churchill and create the Atlantic Charter, which rather blatantly and publicly laid out plans for after the war on behalf of a nation that wasn't in the war.
And at that meeting, Churchill said, look, Roosevelt told me he's going to make every effort to get into this war.
He's going to wage war without declaring it, but he's going to seek every possible way to create an incident, to force an incident.
And this is, of course, what was done.
The government, the U.S. government had a memo from from the year before laying out a series of steps that might provoke Japan to attack.
And the U.S. government took almost all of those steps that could be taken.
This was a McCollum's memo, a memo by a guy named McCollum.
And it was acted on.
And the U.S. had warnings from its ambassador, warnings from having broken the Japanese code, which it had done.
You had Roosevelt predicting to his cabinet when the Japanese would attack.
And he was, you know, off by a week.
But, you know, being off by a week is is not the same thing as being shocked by a surprise.
I mean, I mean, and this is according to the diary of the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, among other places.
So you actually had headlines in newspapers in Hawaii predicting the Japanese might attack this weekend before the attack, which, you know, that that's hard to that's hard to erase from memory.
But it's been done.
Hang on just one sec for me.
Guys, you got to check out Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex in America after World War Two, during the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy.
And it's a real education.
Check it out.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
And also check out his great investment advice at WallStreetWindow.com.
You know, I read there was a piece that I ran at the Libertarian Institute by a new writer the other day who had some quotes from, I think, British intelligence saying that, yeah, when I heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, I thought, oh, awesome, man, because, you know, we're going to find out the details that our guys, that the Americans were waiting for them and must have blown them out of the sky and must have given them the welcome of their lives or something like that.
And then he found out that, no, all their guard had been down.
So what do you think about Kimmett and all the guys out there at Pearl Harbor, the commanders at Pearl Harbor, what they knew, how badly they were hung out to dry compared to their real responsibility?
Because it seems like, well, I don't know, were they in on it, too, or not, do you think?
I don't think so.
I think that the, you know, air-conditioned warriors in their nice offices in Washington, D.C., sacrificed the lives and equipment that were put at risk in Pearl Harbor in order to have an attack on innocents, in order to, you know, as they said in numerous communications, have Japan make the first move, have Japan be the one to attack.
And not just because the military was eager for a war against Japan, but because the White House was extremely eager to get into a war in Europe against the Germans.
And in fact, this became publicly known relatively recently.
Roosevelt, when he first drafted a declaration of war to take to Congress, the last one in the history of the United States, he declared war on both Japan and Germany.
This is, you know, the night after Pearl Harbor.
And he was talked out of it, that the public still wasn't ready to go along with him in a war on Germany, and he edited it and submitted only a declaration of war on Japan.
And it was presumably to his great relief, and the great relief of everyone in the White House and State Department eager to get a war going in Europe, that the Nazis then declared war on the United States, presumably hoping that this would make Japan their allies against the Soviets, which it didn't.
Yeah, and in fact, I'm glad you mentioned that.
It goes to show my ignorance of this topic or your specialized information on this topic that you brought that up, and I don't think I've ever heard that brought up before.
It always seems to be spoken of as a mystery as to how could Hitler be so stupid as to pick a fight with the Americans when he didn't have to.
At that point, as you said, Roosevelt was constrained and only declared war on Japan at that point.
And he saw what happened last time.
He knew that there was basically unlimited industrial potential in America, that all he could do was buy time before the Americans got there.
But so that makes sense then if he thought that the Japanese could really help to split Russian forces or Soviet forces to ease up his fight on the Eastern Front before the Americans arrived.
I think that's part of the explanation almost certainly, but I think another part of it is absolutely certainly that people in the United States dramatically overestimate the importance of the United States in that war or almost any other war.
And Hitler and the Nazis knew that the United States was already involved in supplying material and financing and so forth to the Allies and to a lesser extent to the Nazis themselves.
There were US corporations helping fund and arm the Nazis right through the war as well.
But that the US was not – the US was eager to be involved in the war but was not eager to sacrifice lots of US soldiers in the effort and was not going to make a huge difference and did not ever make a huge difference.
In fact, the Soviets won World War II.
The Soviets did at least 80 percent of defeating Nazi Germany militarily.
Well, it seems like the role the Americans played was mostly the role we just talked about that the Russian – I mean that the Germans hoped that Japanese would play for the Russians and that is just divide the forces and therefore weaken the Eastern Front by turning some divisions west.
I mean D-Day was – and the resulting invasion of France and of Italy wasn't nothing.
It just – it wasn't nothing compared to the war on the Eastern Front.
That's all.
Well, it wasn't what Roosevelt was eager for and it didn't happen for years.
It was delayed and delayed with Stalin begging and pleading for it and it only came when the British and the Americans were afraid that the Russians were going to march into Berlin alone, which is what they did not want.
They saw the Soviet commies as the number one enemy through the course of the war and for decades to follow despite the fact that they were allies.
And so when it appeared that – as long as it appeared that Germans and Russians were going to keep killing each other, there was no initiative to get into the war in central Europe in any significant way.
But as soon as it looked like the Russians were going to occupy Germany on their own and determine its fate after the war, well, that changed things.
Right.
Horizon.
Global.
That's H-O-R-I-Z-E-N.
Horizon.
Global.
It's the new Zencash.
It's now much more than a digital currency.
It's a platform for all kinds of new secure digital applications based on their great blockchain system, their Horizon.
Global, to learn all about it.
Okay, so now back to the religion of all of this.
It really seems to me that – because it's just a matter of conception and perception and subjection anyway – but it seems like Roosevelt has really replaced George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or anything like that in terms of the civic religion.
And that the modern American state was born in the New Deal and in World War II.
And that, as you say in here, they declared war for the last time and they haven't turned it off since.
The military-industrial complex that was built up during that time never did get turned back off again, like was supposed to be the tradition anyway, to demobilize the military.
Instead, they've just found nothing but more things to do this whole time, basically.
And, of course, World War II with America in the role of Superman liberating France, our good friends, and taking all the credit for the war.
I mean, most Americans don't even know the Soviets were in it or what have you.
That part gets airbrushed out.
The Americans were the ones who get all the credit in this narrative.
And then it serves to justify every intervention since.
That whatever your problem is, Swanson, oh yeah, well what about that time we had to go stop Hitler?
You do nothing about that.
And that's the go-to for every warmonger because, as you said, they have to go back 75 years to find a monster bad enough to point at.
They won't even say, well, the Cold War or anything.
They won't say Korea.
They go all the way back to that far, but they use that Hitler excuse to justify the war in Panama, the war in Iraq for the last 25 years and counting.
The wars in wherever you got, wherever's next is, you know, World War II and Hitler will be invoked for that too.
And from now on.
Yeah.
So I guess there should be a question there.
So what do we do about that other than read your great book and your great articles about why?
Yeah, no, World War II wasn't good either.
Well, and for your audience in particular, perhaps, although for everybody as well, we live here in the United States in a country that loves war but hates taxes and hasn't got a clue where in the heck taxes came from.
But there was no income tax on ordinary people until World War II, and it was supposed to pay for World War II and go away again, just like the ginormous military and all the foreign bases and the occupations of Germany and Japan and the rest of it were supposed to go away again.
I mean, you had Irving Berlin songs and Walt Disney tunes and infomercials and, you know, little videos and Donald Duck.
And look at those bombers in the sky.
Rockefeller paid for them and so did I.
And, you know, taxes to defeat the Axis.
And you were supposed to love paying taxes, but it wasn't supposed to last forever.
The budget wasn't supposed to go on forever.
The military spending that makes up 60 percent of discretionary spending today wasn't supposed to go on forever and did.
And we got this permanent state of war with a permanent, you know, regurgitated propaganda from this one war justifying war after war after war for 75 years that nobody likes, nobody approves of, nobody sold on the propaganda.
They just revert back to the propaganda of World War II and say, well, because I like World War II, which people increasingly like the further we get away from it, I might like the next war.
So we got to be prepared for the next war, even though these other wars were no good.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess, you know, the only real anecdote.
No, forget anecdote.
The antidote is the anecdotes.
The antidote is this kind of work like you're doing right here to just undermine that.
And I really get the kind of overall, you know, perspective that like, oh, I get it.
We're just because all these guys were in power before I was born, long before I was born and all of that.
They were adults before I even existed.
That actually, really, Franklin Roosevelt was just George W. Bush.
And his secretary of war was just Dick Cheney.
And these guys were just a bunch of scumbags, just like all presidents and all politicians and cabinets and senators are always the standard by which you measure corruption and venality and narrow sidedness and short sidedness, narrow mindedness.
So what would we expect from any of them except to give us world wars?
Seriously.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, these these guys are never identical, but they are the same in the sense of having committed mass murder and committed mass murder that is less and less acceptable with each passing year.
As we learn more and more about the options of nonviolence.
And I mean, all I mean by the comparison is just that's how much respect they're due.
Right.
Like you're the way you're taught in public school when you're a kid is this guy in the wheelchair.
He was still as big as Lincoln on his throne in the Great Memorial there.
You know, this towering, you know, hero of all of humanity, FDR, where this is some Hitler level treason here at Pearl Harbor, buddy.
So it's only got to be one or the other.
And and so that's kind of what I mean is that when George W.
Bush, to me, is shorthand for the lowest form of life imaginable, you know, worth less than a worm.
And so to think that all the great heroes of our history are, yeah, actually just a bunch of hymns spread over time, more or less, is, I think, a pretty beneficial way to look at it, if not perfect, you know.
Well, I take the point and agree with it, although I'm not going to say a human being is worth less than a worm, no matter who that human being is, because that's Nazism and that's what I'm trying to defeat.
But but I think that when somebody like the first Bush dies and people debate his legacy, I think the fact that he committed mass murder with no possible justification in places like Iraq and Panama and elsewhere, that's it.
You know, stop right there.
That should be 95 percent of of his legacy.
That's the thing to focus on.
And it's not focused on at all.
It's shut out by, you know, some substantive things, but mostly a bunch of nonsense.
Yeah.
Well, I guess I think of it in terms of maybe worm isn't the right term.
But at some point you commit enough crime under the law, you cede away your right.
Essentially, even ultimately, we have capital punishment where the law considers that upon conviction, you have even ceded your right to continue living because of usually, you know, for murder.
That would be especially for murder of a government employee.
They take that kind of thing real seriously.
And war crimes are part of that.
That's under American law.
And I'm not saying I'm prescribing anybody being hurt or anything like that.
But I'm just saying the law, according to the law, George Bush has ceded his right even to live, certainly to live free.
And so that's denying his humanity in a sense.
Right.
He doesn't get to be a free person anymore.
He gets to be a prisoner at best.
And maybe on death row, along with his peers, you know, like Ted Kaczynski at the Supermax there, you know.
Well, I'm opposed to the death penalty.
I'm opposed to locking people in cages for decades.
But whatever criminal justice system you have, whether I like it or not, I certainly agree with you that our top criminals are our top several U.S. presidents.
I mean, there's no question they have had the most power to commit the worst crimes and they've done so.
There's there's not a current or living former U.S. president who isn't among the top criminals on Earth.
And we give them a pass when it's war.
You know, can you imagine any lesser mass murderer or any mass shooter who's shot up a mere dozen people in some U.S. nightclub getting the sort of respect and treatment in the media when when he dies that a former president gets?
It's it's an outrageous blind spot in our culture.
Right.
Crimes against humanity.
But Swanson, don't you know I'm from here?
So that can't be right.
You're talking about my team, buddy.
Yeah.
You know, the other 96 percent of humanity is human, too.
This is what a lot of Americans tend to forget.
And this is a this is a different age from World War Two.
Whatever you want to think about it, you want to go back and justify it.
But agree with me that you can't justify any more wars going forward.
Then I don't care what you think about history.
But there were no nuclear bombs back then.
There was conquest and colonialism.
And, you know, we now have the rule of law and understanding of nonviolence that we didn't have back then.
And we have a U.S. military that is among the top destroyers of the natural environment, which is rapidly being destroyed.
So that if we don't get nuclear apocalypse, we're going to get climate apocalypse anyway.
We don't have the option now for numerous reasons.
It's also true, too, that back then there really was a, you know, proudly stated and outright, you know, poppycock science based theories of racial supremacy and even, you know, biblically cited racial excuses for pseudoscience.
And the Bible, too, I guess, cited to justify the age of colonialism and outright imperialism.
That's why we have not even Neo, but like Neo, Neo imperialism now where everything's deniable.
I mean, not everything, but it's all supposed to be as deniable as possible because they can't outright claim that darker skinned people are lesser forms of life and therefore deserve it in the way that they could before.
So that there's it's a pretty, you know, it's been a hard transition from the old order to the new when it comes to that kind of thing.
Well, it's still in progress, you know, here.
But it demands a reckoning.
I mean, that's the whole thing about it is there has to be a reckoning and that, you know, this kind of thing cannot go on like the terror wars have been.
It just cannot be like this.
Well, it's it's it's a work in progress, getting rid of racist eugenicist thinking.
Obviously, it was popular and mainstream back in the 20s and 30s in the United States.
And the Nazis actually learned quite a lot about eugenics and racist theories and and Jim Crow style laws from the Americans.
Another part of history we don't like to remember.
But it's you know, the the you know, the science hasn't borne out.
There's there's a great film just out now called A Dangerous Idea about the history of eugenics slash genetics as it sort of had to change its name because of of the association with the Nazis.
But the willingness to go with pseudoscientific claims to back the arguments of racists and sexists and plutocrats, you know, has never fully gone away.
No, certainly not, although I think like in the overall sense, it has, if not, you know, every specific case.
But it's it's seen as not legitimate overall, I guess, by and large around here now.
But anyway, I know that you're late and I'm late, but I appreciate all the great work that you do.
And for this great article, we'll be linking to it on antiwar dot com.
It's at David Swanson dot org.
Everybody, it's called The Ancient Mythical Rites of Pearl Harbor, and we'll be rerunning it at the Libertarian Institute as well.
And so thank you very much for your time and hope we can talk again soon.
Thanks, Scott.
Keep up the good work.
Appreciate it.
Oh, and War is a Lie is this great book, too.
And there's a few books, but that's, you know, the book.
War is a Lie by David Swanson.
OK, thanks, guys.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org.
Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand.
Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
